We acknowledge our identity privilege as white middle class women. In our everyday workplaces, feminist struggles continue; and what seems to us to be basic principles, require endless restating, reinforcing our unease. The ‘trouble’ for us is partly in recognising the historical, structural relations that conditioned our initial resistance still continue. Intersectional feminism causes us to recognise that the ‘we’ of women is also the ‘we’ of significant difference and unequal experiences of oppression. We cannot speak for each other. The focus turns to speaking with each other. Butler’s (2014) argument that our fear of being seen as vulnerable intersects with our desire to act and to have agency reinforces the personal and causes us to reimagine our collective purposes. Our identity is constantly re-assembled by our experience of the ‘other’--and who society expects/denies; and more importantly we re-construct our space as crafters and weavers of a different societal space. The ability to protest (eg: The Women’s Marches in January 2017) is a nod from the system, that keeps us humming our songs of resistance but rarely changes our conditions of living. We analyse these ideas with reference to MILCK’s ‘I Can’t Keep Quiet’ and Oppenheim’s ‘Bread and Roses’.

Feminist researchers encourage women to tell their stories and share lived experiences and emotions that, due to the nature of our research topics, are often intimate and may not have been voiced elsewhere. We build relationships with our participants to enable them to tell their stories in a safe environment but also to obtain ‘good’ data. As a feminist researcher, I teach and use biographical methods that require multiple engagements and interaction with participants and I often use a ‘layered account’. Layering involves using multiple methods and often a mix of textual and visual methods to enable people to express emotions, especially when researching topics that are traumatic. In this presentation, I discuss how layering using biographical methods provides rich data and a texturing of biographies but often leaves unexamined morality as fundamentally interpersonal and co-produced. Thus, what remains missing are the ethical tensions that emerge from parameters of engagement like, willingness to assist by sharing stories to help others, politeness or cleverly crafted question that enable people to open up. I examine how engagement in biographical research provides me with both understanding and discomfort as I write women’s biographies.

Despite decades of feminist troublemaking, the mining industry in Australia and around the world, continues to employ troublingly low numbers of women in any capacity. In 2016, women constituted just under 12% of board membership in the top 100 mining companies. At the same time, 86.3% of the total Australian mining workforce was male, which saw the mining industry ranked as the second lowest employer of women in Australia. This paper seeks to engender trouble by situating this lack of progress in terms of a broader cultural failure to address social reproduction and the complicities of liberal feminism. At the same time, it examines contemporary attempts to ‘celebrate women in mining’ as is occurring through the International Women in Mining ‘Impact and Influence’ photo competition. In providing a discourse analysis the paper engages with a ‘politics of hope’ and women’s activism, in particular in (re)constructing the identity of ‘women in mining’.